More from Bialowieza

Words and Pictures by Barry Murphy, Tourism Pure

Tx 200, 0-8-0T, unknown builder. Photo Barry Murphy

I was leading a walking tour of Bialowieza National Park in March 2008. We were meeting a representative of the National Park at Hajnowka and before we left, he showed us the two locomotives. One was exhibited outside on a short piece of track together with some timber wagons. The other was inside the workshops.

The narrow gauge railway stem from Hajnowka through the Bialowieza Forest includes still has some 90 km of tracks. Built by the Germans during WW1 to extract wood some 400km of track were laid. The lines were extensively used in the 1920s by the Century European Timber Corporation, a British company referred to as “Centurion” by the National Parks staff of today, to ‘rape’ the forests of their greatest oaks and other hardwoods.

One Response to “More from Bialowieza”

If one both likes railways and steam locomotives, and is concerned about the natural environment, there are times when the one sits not very easily with the other — rather a case of that, here.

I have seen suggestions recently, that the Bialowieza Forest “national park” area — rigorously conserved for a very long time — has in the course of the past couple of decades, largely been opened up to the depredations of commercial logging; figure cited, of only 8% of the erstwhile conservation area still having “protected” status. If true, this is extremely regrettable.